The Edge is a border, the horizon, a line of the probable future. Approaching the Edge is fraught with anxious expectations as whatever may be hidden there: pain, loss and even awful end of all that exists. We are used to expect disasters from behind the horizon, so the image of it often brings sense of fear and melancholy. But if we are to stop and look down in front of us, then we’ll see that the Edge is at the same time the soil we stand on and rooted in. It has beauty and strength in it. From the soil under our feet till horizon there is the dynamic beauty of the Edge, a landscape in front of our eyes. Maybe we should stop on the Edge to look through it and think where to go.
Prominent, energetic paintings of Vladimir Migachev speak with a viewer not the descriptive-realistic language, but the expressive-emotional one. This is a mix of pure pictorialism, clear idea and definite emotional attitude. One who sees the pictures of the artist is confronted by extremely descriptive, desolate, ageographic landscape and then collapses through prominent and thick layers of paint right into sensational and conceptual reverse of the picture. Lines, forms and colors recede into the background, and it becomes clear that the landscape is not about a particular spot on our Earth, but sensation that everyone experience at least once. Everyone who stares hard into remote spaces fading away behind grey horizon, into washed out roads, into clouds of light smoke in the sky, into silent forest – gets the sensation of the Edge.
Darya Dzikevich